So we’re all set to give a short presentation at Ignite SF on Tuesday 10/16 at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco. It looks like it will be something like Dorkbot on meth: presenters are limited to 5 minute talks and 15 seconds per slide. As you might expect of something organized by O’Reilly, a lot of the cool kids will be there. Come and join them, oh and us too!

Details here.

A lot of folks managed to miss SWARM out on the playa. (We understand — it’s not like there wasn’t anything else to distract you.) If that’s the case, or even if it wasn’t, here’s a chance to get up close and personal with our spheres at their first public appearance in the Bay Area.

We’ll be at the 8th annual SF Decompression HEAT THE STREET FaIRE. Some of our intrepid pedalheads will be riding the Mothership all the way from Hunter’s Point and back so respect! to them.

We don’t have our exact placement yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we do. Come out and decompress!

Details: Sunday, October 7, 2007
Noon SHARP till 12 am
Public Entrance: 19th & Minnesota
(On Indiana Street between Mariposa and 22nd, SF)
$10 donation in Black Rock Couture/Costume; $20 in streetwear
All ages outdoors; kids under 12 are free!

The fine folks from current.tv spent a lot of time with us, both before the desert and on the playa. They took some great footage — watch a 3-minute version here:

http://www.current.tv/pods/tvfreeburningman/PD07162

They did a spectacular job of capturing what it felt like on the playa and we thank them!

 “One of the neatest things I have seen in the self-expressive miasma that is Burning Man, the countercultural arts festival here in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, has been The Orb Swarm, a group of spherical robots designed to roll around the playa and interact with participants with lights, motion and sound.”

http://valleywag.com/tech/burning-man/the-orb-swarm-rules-the-night-295729.php

Here’s the text blurb from a short video piece that ran in the local news last night-

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=drive_to_discover&id=5584601

View a local archive.

i’ve made progress on the path smoother.  it takes a path made from a few points and converts it into a smoothed path (using cubic curves) and waypoints along that smoothed path with times and velocities associated with the waypoints.  the waypoints are all the same distance from each other in time.  the roundedness of the curves is adjustable as it the acceleration profile.  in some cases the path comes up a little short – due to inaccuracies in guessing when to start slowing down.  in any case good enough for now.  my test images are kinda fun so i thought i’d pass those along.

-trebor

a good one.

Don’t let the dead air fool ya, we’re working our little orbs off behind the scenes. We’re too busy to post! Some stats courtesy our Subversion code management software: we’re averaging 10 file changes per day. When you keep in mind we’re only a few days into August (last bar on the graph) the trend is clear.

Hey orbsters,

whiling away a slow afternoon stuck inside, daydreaming about rolling robots?  well, now you can all gaze at the juicy bits, without needing a big fancy CAD program!  Rotate, zoom,  selectively hide parts for a better view, the orb is your oyster!

I put an edrawing of the current whole orb assembly here-

http://svn.lee.org/swarm/trunk/mechanical/v0_7/integrated.EASM
(local copy)
which you can view with the free utility here-

http://www.edrawingsviewer.com/pages/products/eDrawingsViewerpage.html
(local copy)

they’ve even got a Mac version-

http://www.edrawingsviewer.com/MAC_Viewer.html

(sorry, linux… maybe VMware?)

This is great for viewing, and reality checking thoughts like “I want to put a giant speaker/flame thrower/LED array/flux capacitor on the orb here.”

The one thing I’m finding it’s not so good for is importing data into a different program.  I guess I’m still looking for a really good portable format that does real parametric solid assemblies.

-mike

It was too hot to think, let alone point a camera straight, but I did get a few pictures:

The playa crew

Geek Week camp Note 40-ft tower for the microwave link to Gerlach

Breakfast for everyone!

Hacking on the playa. Note specialized desert hacking gear: extra monitor, spent pyro, box of whippits (likely spent as well), sunglasses, insulated coffee mug.

Danger Ranger’s mobile wifi rig, plus orb.

Well, after a long weekend of late nights at the shop, Mike, Ray, Niladri and I made it to the playa on the Fourth with orb in tow. Big thanks to everyone who helped us get there, and to the folks at Geek Week who let us mooch off their wifi and shade structure. (As there were record high temperatures even for the desert, the latter was likely more than a metaphorical lifesaver.) In any case, we found and fixed several problems, got in some roll-testing and data-logging, and generally had a baking good time.
More pictures and pontifications to come, but here’s a video to start with. We were really happy how smooth things were rolling. Considering the challenging environment and the last-minute addition of the “bucket handle” radome, I don’t think this qualifies as anything less than a total success. So we raise a hot can of triple-digit Tecate to everyone! Woot!

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